Delayed Reaction: Blood Diamond

The Pitch: Leonardo DiCaprio ends the corruption of the diamond trade in Africa.

I think I've finally figured out what Edward Zwick does as a director. He takes prestige movies and turns them into Hollywood movies. Think about it...

• Love & Other Drugs is a story about a troubled romance between a women with Parkinson's and a drug rep for Pfizer. It's easy to see how Anne Hathaway could think she'd get another Oscar nomination for her role in it. The film ends up being a fairly traditional RomCom with some edge to it, not that different from Silver Linings Playbook.
• Defiance sounds a little like "Schindler's List in the woods". The film ends up having some of the Oscar bait-y material, but also ends up being an accessible action movie.
• The Last Samurai is Dances with Wolves in Japan, then adds a few big battle sequences to keep it Hollywood friendly.

Legends of the Fall, Courage Under Fire, and even The Siege all sound like prestige movies at first then end up being much more populist in execution. I don't mean this as a bad thing either. I love The Last Samurai because of this. Zwick is one of Hollywood's great compromisers (Again. Not an insult). He is a director who keeps getting to make movie with good budgets and big names. While a Best Picture nomination has remained elusive, his films have picked up other Oscar nominations along the way and even some wins*.

*In recent years, he's dropped this trend some. Pawn Sacrifice was small to the point that I wonder if it was just a passion project of his, and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back aspires to nothing more than Zwick wanting to work with Tom Cruise again.

Blood Diamond fits perfectly into Zwick's filmography. It's a serious enough film to net a few Oscar nominations. Most notably, it's the film Leo earned a nomination for instead of The Departed, which won Best Picture. He probably should've been a double-nominee that year. The Oscar attention made up for the fact that it was a moderate box office loser*. The movie is essentially Hotel Rwanda as an adventure flick.

*Zwick has an impressive run of films that match production cost and box office returns closely.

I liked the movie well enough. DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou are really good in it. Jennifer Connelly is a little underused. The movie drags a little in the middle and juggles more narratives than it can handle by the end. The ending is almost too neat. I feel like that can be said of most of Zwick's films though. Besides, I'll take neat and satisfying over messy and unsatisfying any day of the week.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend